The good thing about Microsoft Word is that even if you forget to save the document you are working on or experience a crash, Word may still save it for you. How? Because by default Word auto-saves your document every 10 minutes. But quite often the interval of 10 minutes is too long and you can still lose your work. Luckily, you can easily decrease the interval and make Word save your work more often. I’m on a Mac, so I’m going to show you how to do it in Word 2011 for Mac. It’s similar enough on Windows, though.

First you’ll need to click on Word in the menu and go to Preferences:

Now click on the Save icon. This will take you to Word saving preferences:

There you will see an option to edit your auto-save interval. By default it’s set to 10 minutes, but you can configure Word to auto-save your documents as often as you like. I’m going to set it to every 5 minutes:

If you want to be extra careful, you can also check Always create backup copy.

When you’re done, click on the OK button.

Now your Microsoft Word 2011 for Mac will auto-save your work a lot more often. And if you ever change your mind, you can always go back and increase the auto-save interval.